Back on the train now, and pondering blog reading. Late last week, one of the blogs I read moved to a redesigned site. Now, I'm sure it is a picture of well designed lovelyness; with css this and ajax that, but all of that is irrelevant to me. I read blogs using an RSS reader, on a blackberry, whilst commuting (underground for half the time). Browsing to a website is a visual nightmare on a blackberry at the best of times; and a technical impossibility underground.
I have a program that connects to the internet at regular intervals, checks all the sites I'm interested in, and downloads the text of any new articles from those sites, storing them for me to read at a later date. I get news and technical information from the usual sources, but the majority of what I read is blogs. Normal people, writing about their stuff.
The problem with feeds is truncation. Most blog sites have 3 options when it comes to packaging your content. The default is usually to send out the post whole. Another option is to send out just the title (useless really). The third is to send out the first paragraph with a link at the bottom to "Read more". This is the one I hate. Just enough text to get you interested, and then bam! A link I can't follow. This is a deal breaker for me.
As someone with a wife, and small baby, and a job that gives me no chance to catch breath; the only place and time I have to read blogs is whilst commuting. Which means the blackberry. Which means RSS only.
So, why do people choose the truncation option? I can understand it for the magazine blogs. The ones from infoworld or the register. RSS feeds get just text. Some pictures (although they don't work underground as they are downloaded at read time), but no ads. So, for blogs that are there to draw in readers in the hope of moving them to other content, and getting a few ad impressions past them I can understand. (The fact that deep linking via google, and ad blocking programs make this method of getting money useless is irrelevant)
However, for personal blogs I don't get it. Surely all you want is for people to read your text? Who cares if I don't see your selection of font, and your beautiful backdrop. I certainly don't. This leads us to where I came in. A blog I have been reading for a long time has had a redesign, and in the process has moved from full posts to truncated ones. I wrote to the blogger pointing out the problem (I've done this twice before and the blogger wasn't even aware of it. In those cases, their new site had given a default of truncate), and was told that it was by design. They believe RSS feeds are there to alert you to a new post which you will then go direct to the website to read. They hoped I would catch up on the post once I got back online, and hoped I would continue to read. Well I can't. My life doesn't allow for blog reading at a computer (it's everything I can do just to get the daily dibert some days!), so their blog has gone. The really annoying part of this is that the blog in question was one of the best; well written, funny, one of the ones I scanned down the list for in the hope that it had updated. And now it's gone. Oh well.
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